666 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 881 



POPULAB MISCONCEPTIONS CONCERNING 

 PRECOCITY IN CHILDBEN'^ 



Students of the history of education 

 know that at one time or another since 

 Plato's day efforts have been made to 

 hasten the development of children in re- 

 spect to the acquisition of the formal 

 branches of school instruction. Programs 

 have been worked out with a view to teach- 

 ing children to read and to write almost 

 as soon as they should begin to talk. How- 

 ever, it is significant of our latter-day 

 theories on this subject that the classical 

 writers on education esteemed most highly 

 in our times are distinguished because of 

 their vigorous opposition to these forcing 

 systems. Locke, Rousseau, Spencer, and 

 their numerous disciples have devoted 

 themselves to exposing the evil, as they 

 have thought, of introducing children too 

 early to reading, writing, arithmetic and 

 the like, maintaining that children who 

 were put to books too early were thereby 

 made dull and stupid instead of intelligent 

 and capable. These pioneers in the dis- 

 cussion of a rational educational regime 

 endeavored to convince the parents and 

 teachers of their day that the early years 

 of life should be spent in spontaneous ac- 

 tivities, in contact with nature, and in 

 give-and-take relations with playmates. 

 When Spencer took up the problem, he at- 

 tempted to give scientific validity to the 

 common-sense views of Locke and Rous- 

 seau by pointing out that it is easily pos- 

 sible to arrest the development of the 

 child's brain by crowding him through 

 subjects of study which are not suited to 

 his stage of development. According to 

 the Spencerian view, it is a mistake to 

 stimulate brain areas before nature in- 



^ Presented before Section L, American Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science, at the Min- 

 neapolis meeting. 



tended they should be exercised; which 

 means, for one thing, that the child should 

 not be taught the three R's at two or three 

 or even four years of age. The followers 

 of Spencer have been wont to interpret his 

 views on this question by likening the de- 

 velopment of the intellect to the develop- 

 ment of the digestive and assimilative sys- 

 tems. If a babe be given meat before 

 nature has prepared the organism for it, 

 nothing but harm can result therefrom, 

 which fact may be observed by any one 

 who is not obsessed by notions to the con- 

 trary. Spencer brought forward biolog- 

 ical and psychological evidence showing, 

 as he believed, and as practically all stu- 

 dents in this field now think, that there is 

 a definite order in which the intellectual 

 activities should be awakened; and if we 

 try to upset this order in our educational 

 programs we can hardly fail to disturb the 

 delicate adjustments of the mind, and so 

 to leave the individual all the weaker 

 therefor in the end. 



These views expressed by Locke, Rous- 

 seau, Spencer and many more recent stu- 

 dents of education, biology, and psychology 

 have profoundly influenced the thought 

 and practise of teachers, and to a lesser ex- 

 tent of parents, in our own country. In 

 some of the older countries the view is still 

 popularly entertained that the child is a 

 small-sized copy of the adult, possessing in 

 miniature all the powers and faculties of 

 a grown person. So that whatever is ap- 

 propriate for the adult is also appropriate 

 for the child, except that the doses must 

 be reduced for the latter. It is the usual 

 practise in certain of the schools of the 

 Old World, and it was quite the fashion in 

 our own schools a few decades ago, to in- 

 troduce a child of four or five years of age 

 to all the ordinary subjects of instruction 

 in the elementary school. But the develop- 

 ment of biological and psychological sci- 



